Tom The Dancing Bug Takes On Insanity Of Copyright Extension And Disproportionate Punishment

from the awesome dept

One of the more interesting things over the past few months is just how mainstream copyright issues have suddenly become. This point has been driven home with the news that Ruben Bolling's famous Tom the Dancing Bug comic has taken on the excessiveness of both copyright extension and enforcement with his God-man character doing tremendous damage just to enforce the copyright on a work that should be in the public domain:

You can check out some of the comments that people have left under the comic as well. It's really a pretty good description of this debate in many ways. The supporters of these bills don't seem to want to listen. They don't even acknowledge that there might be collateral damage or that copyright has been expanded and stretched in ways that are absolutely ridiculous. You bring up any of that... and they're ready to dash off about some other problem.

Either way, very cool to see Bolling take on this issue, and see the issue getting more and more mainstream attention.

He said "Lady and the Tramp". That is clearly infringement of the copyright of the name of the movie. That is stealing. Now God-Man stole the name of the movie to feed his own need for wrecking buildings. Oh the humanity.

People feel strongly about things they know nothing about

Here's a typical IP maximalist comment from the comments at GO comics:

"DroptmaStyx said, about 11 hours ago

@drklassen – spoken like someone who isn’t trying to make a living as a creative person. If I create something, I own it, and I alone have the right to decide who gets to use it for money,"

What is funny is that this self-righteous IP maximalist doesn't realize that under US IP laws if he creates something all on his own somebody else might all ready own it. That is the way the patent system works. It doesn't matter if you think of something own your own, not even if you put your life's work into it--if somebody thought of it first and patented it, or if they patented some thing vague enough that can later be be claimed to cover it--then DroptmaStyx *doesn't* own his ideas.

People don't think things through before getting very full of themselves about it. And the MPAA, RIAA and right wingers in general, are very good at getting ordinary folks to lobby against and vote against their actual interests.

@drklassen – spoken like someone who isn’t trying to make a living as a creative person. If I create something, I own it, and I alone have the right to decide who gets to use it for money,"

They so want everything every which way.
If I create a vacuum cleaner, other people can buy it and use it in their cleaning business to make money.
If I make some cakes, other people can buy them and sell them on by the slice for a profit.
Only with imaginary property am I able to control what they do with it once they've paid for it.

Surely at some point they will realise how ludicrous their stance is and of course it is all pointless, this would not be an issue right now if copyright was enforceable in the digital era, it simply isn't and instead of coming to terms with it they stand in denial making up imaginary rules for imaginary property and declaring those imagined and useless rules to be their god given rights.

The comments under that comic is both making my blood boil and making my head hurt.

Instead of addressing any of the balls of stupid, I'll instead generalize all of them to the big ball of stupid that they each keep trying to roll out.

If I created an idea, it is mine, I made it, I own it, it belongs to me and solely me and I can do anything I want with it for as long as I want to, it is mine, mine, MINE

This is one of the most misleading, baseless, ignorant arguments I have ever heard for copyright. You can't "own" an idea, you can "own" the information behind an idea, but for it to be of any use to anyone or anything you have to share that information with someone for it to be of any value to anyone, even yourself. If I make a cartoon and then don't share that cartoon with anyone, then it's not much of a creative work as it is a lump of frames and drawings that only I and the people I staffed know about.

So now we get into Copyright, the idea that, while I can't own the idea and I can't own the information, I can at least own the enforcement of my will and intentions over that information.

Which just makes the ignorant fools going "WAAH WAAH I SHOULD BE ABLE TO DICTATE EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS TO IT UNTIL YEARS AND YEARS AFTER I HAVE DIED WHEN MY WILL AND INTENTIONS ARE MEANINGLESS" look even more like crying, spoiled brats. Leading to the same diatribe "Copyright enforcement is important because Intellectual property rights are important because Copyright enforcement is important-..." argument that we see here on Techdirt almost every single day from Anonymous keyboard ninjas who likely only think this way because of the misinformation society has ingrained into people that someone can "own" an idea.

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I really should have mentioned that if I create a cake or a vacuum cleaner, real things, I only get to sell each one once.

But I do love the idea of Paint Manufacturers, Wallpaper Manufacturers, painters, plasterers, electricians and garden centres all deciding that IP rules should apply to property as well and popping along to people like the RIAA and MPAA, to force them to pay for licences to have paint/wallpaper on the walls and potted plants in their offices.
After all, they clearly use them to enhance their businesses and studies have shown that they all help to increase efficiency and many other spurious and ridiculous reasons for thinking that you can charge people multiple times for the same "property"

Re: Re: Re: Re: People feel strongly about things they know nothing about

In the US the less of the 2 evils right now is the Republicans, if there are no others and there is one simple reason for it, republicans got bashed by the Tea Party and are very aware that if they don't pay attention at least a little they will get all replaced by crazier people, so they are more susceptible to the public opinion unlike the Democrats that got shellacked and still press on because their support base is the unions that are in favor of those kind of rules.

What I like about the comments of the copyright defenders is that they think copyright is a right.

Lets ask people how long should anybody be given a monopoly and exclusionary powers and see after people understand what copyright means they still would think life + 95 years of a monopoly is a good thing.

The sense of entitlement of people who love monopolies knows no bounds.

Republicans got spanked in the elections by the Tea Party they are sensitive to public opinion, Democrats receive most of their support from the entertainment industry and unions so they side on the side of stronger monopolies where is the error in that logic?

Republicans would go against the entertainment industry since their biggest support is elsewhere in the Telecom, Oil, Drugs and other stuff.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pirates

I'm a music teacher in PA. We just got a notice from our state association (PMEA) that students auditioning for the state festival will have to play an etude for their audition. However, PMEA is not allowed to photocopy the etude. So you have to play it, but you can't have the music.

You are obviously supposed to go purchase it on your own, but it still seems quite ridiculous.

I could be wrong though but I do believe the republican support was there mostly because of the patents issues, try to do a bill that separate both and bipartisan support would be more difficult to achieve.

As proved recently republicans have no problems throwing the entertainment industry under the bus if they need to, that is not what happens with democrats.

Not that I like a duopoly in politics, I am just acknowledging the fact that they have separated into two distinct camps that share most of their values but disagree in some key points, they most of the time work in unison but can and will squabble over little things.

So if the intent is to change copyrights the best bet today is the republicans that don't feel that strongly about it and have shown that they have no problems leaving the entertainment industry to hang dry, democrats on the other hand just proved that they will exert tremendous pressure to expand monopolistic controls for whatever reason and that can't be good.

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If someone creates an artistic work, (s)he should be able to reap the benefits of that work for some time. No one is, or should be challenging that.

But what happens when that time is extended into oblivion? We have seen it stifle innovation before, the best and simple example would be the eighties 'The holiday rap', where an old tune was the base of a new work (and the creator of the new work has never seen one cent of it).

The derived work was new, brave and 'super cool' for its time, but the rightsholder was not interested in new music, only his own pocket, and he rather let someone else work than work himself..

When time passes perception, techniques and idea's change so that old 1951 version of 'The day the earth stood still' could be redone in a much better way. No one complains about that.. Some stories are old and get retold in different forms many times, like Ever after: A Cinderella story. It would be a shame if we were told not to redo that movie or that song in Techno-style (Blackbox's Right on time).